The Twenty Sixth of March, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
For so many months, you have been my only true companion. Too many months, far too many if I am honest. I do want to thank you though, dear diary, without you I would have been lost—fully and completely. When my dear and darling husband left me here on his search for the origin of that mysterious plague that brought so much death and whispered rumors to Wisborg, striking without rhyme or reason and leaving families decimated in its path, I confess that I felt terror for him and horror at the idea that he would willingly head to that town to study this disaster, but I was not surprised. My darling Edmund is a scientist, a man of medicine, and a great man and, as my mother always said, a great man would never shy from his duty, and so—while the plague had not come near to England, he still felt it his duty to investigate—he set out as quickly as he could arrange with one goal that he related to me: find out why it stopped as it had, such a terrible plague should not have just ceased. He and his fellows who studied such outbreaks of disease were all in agreement: that such a terrible, unfathomable disease should not have simply halted when, if anything, it seemed to be gathering strength. Such an occurrence needed to be investigated.
That was weeks ago… No, that’s wrong. It was months ago. Weeks ago was when I last heard from him, but you knew that already. I’ve complained and lamented many times to you over those days and weeks, how those minutes and hours without a word from him were hellish, that his lack of communication was worrying at best and selfish at worst. You, my confidant, have heard it all. I wrote of my loneliness, of how each day away from my love was agony. I wrote of my misery when Edmund had been reported missing after they could not locate him in his rooms a few weeks after he arrived in Wisborg, and I wrote of my cautious joy and optimism when they found him in that abandoned home a few days later. I have spoken to you about everything, everything but the words I am about to write, the words I have longed to write for several weeks now: Edmund is returning home! I received word just this morning that he is now fully risen from the state of catatonia that the doctors in Wisborg were treating him for and he even managed to ask to come home, though he was unclear as to where he was exactly and how he had arrived there. The doctors wrote that they feel that this fugue state will pass, and he will recall exactly what led him to that house but—to be perfectly honest—I don’t care what he was doing in that empty home, I’m simply impatient for him to arrive. In the meantime, they begged me to be patient with Edmund, and they cautioned me that he is still very ill and would need plenty of bed rest in the coming weeks. I care not though; he is coming home! I would care for him for a thousand years as long as he greeted me each morning with a kiss and a whisper and said goodnight to me in the same fashion, I missed him so and I cannot wait to see him again. I shall write more here after he returns to me. In the meantime, I need to attend to some errands I have put off for far too long, and I need to visit Mr. Sandu later to drop off some of the dessert I made earlier. That’s right, I baked to celebrate the good news. It is a shame, dearest diary, that you have no mouth to eat with or a tongue to taste with or I could share a world of confectionery delight with you! Then again, who knows what kind of terrible gossip you’d be if you had a mouth to move and a tongue to form words with! I will write more soon!
The Seventh of April, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
I cannot stand it any longer. I did not want to write about any of this, but I can no longer stay my hand. If I do not speak or write about this, even if it is just to you, I feel as though I will explode. Everything is awful, my world is falling apart one piece at a time. It started when the doctors arrived here with Edmund in tow. When I saw him, I was, and still am, at a loss: The stranger in my house is not the man who once held me in his arms and danced with me for hours on end. He is a scarecrow version of my Edmund, a terrifying effigy which has done nothing but rot since they brought it back from Wisborg. It’s true, the man I am caring for is little more than a living and breathing corpse and I am left wanting for the return of my real husband as this forgery withers up and turns to dust. Reading over that last sentence, I seem hysterical like a poor, lost housewife. I am not, though. I am not some helpless or hapless member of my gender; I am a strong and independent manager of my home and ruler of my life. I was raised by several powerful women to be a powerful woman myself, one capable of springing into action in the face of disaster, and so I went ahead and tried to manage this situation on my own. I followed the instructions left behind by the doctors. They told me to keep him confined to bed, that rest was key to his recovery as were the various powders and poultices they left behind. They explained that they did not know what, exactly, was wrong with him; they could only say that he was not contagious and so they felt it best that he recover at home. They could also offer no explanation as to how Edmund arrived at the location where he was eventually found or what he was doing there. Edmund, they said, was able to eat and move but they cautioned me that he no longer spoke and was prone to staring without blinking for long periods of time. He would, they promised as they left, be no trouble at all, save for his chronic somnambulism. They lied of course; the trouble started almost as soon as they left.
I went to the room where the doctors had carried him when they arrived. It would have served as our nursery, but we have so far been unsuccessful in producing an heir to our vast and glorious holdings. So instead, it has served as a sometime-guest room and sometime-storage room and now it is Edmund’s sick room, where I shall nurse him. I remember taking a deep breath and steadying myself before I opened the door. I tried to put on a happy expression as I stepped into the room. I did not want Edmund to see the concern on my face or hear worry in my voice as I find that healing happens best in a healthy environment. The room was almost pitch black; the window was closed, and the curtain drawn, and a single candle cast a guttering and flickering light which hardly moved the darkness that crowded the room. Shadow clung to Edmund, the thin light did little to illuminate the handsome face I missed so much. I walked to the dresser where the candle sat and picked it up, guiding it carefully as I went to Edmund’s side. The flame did not dispel the thick darkness which permeated the room and I found myself increasingly frustrated as the shadows danced and writhed in the candlelight, obscuring Edmund’s face. The darkness was odd in that way, it did not respect the light. I frowned and put the candle down, reaching with my free hand to wipe the darkness away from him but I paused and chided myself for my foolish reaction to some shadows. Instead, I left the candle where it was and walked to the other side of the bed to the window. Let the darkness be gone, I thought to myself as I whipped the window coverings aside and threw open the shutters to let the sun in. I heard a whimper and a hiss behind me as the daylight streamed into the room and then a thump as I whirled around to see what was wrong. The bed was empty, and I rushed around the side in time to see Edmund lying in the pooling darkness that the far side of the bed provided from the sun. He was face down, his feet reaching under the bed and his hands limply lying palms down next to his head. I rushed to him, I knelt and grabbed his hand to lift him up and…well that’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t want to even write down what happened because I don’t believe it myself but…no, I have to write this down. I suppose, for accuracy’s sake, I will need to set aside the skepticism of my own mind and trust that what happened, however it happened, did in fact happen.
Kneeling there next to Edmund I took his hands gently in mine, but he did not stir, and I sat there for a few moments, gently stroking the back of his hand and wishing with all my heart that I could have him back as he was; begging God to let me hear him laugh or to see his smile again. I seem dramatic—I know I must—but if you think so then you do not understand the sort of love I felt for my husband and just how drastically he had changed in the months since he left. He was wasted and gaunt, with skin pale and tautly stretched over his skeletal frame, and his head and face were covered in sores and dry skin. His hair was falling out in patches and his eyes were so deeply sunken that I could not see anything but darkness welling up in the pits left behind. His eyes! When I lifted his head to see if he was injured in the fall from the bed, I felt overcome in the moment with a need to see his eyes; it was a need to establish any kind of normalcy in a dire situation, I suppose, and his eyes were what caught my attention when we first met all those years ago. I can, even now, remember how they sparkled with life and were filled with joy on the day we met at the town fair. I remember how tender and full of love they were on our wedding day. I remember now and I remembered then, and I needed to see that they were still there, but they were dull, lifeless things, a sad reflection of what they once had been. Staring into his dead and dark eyes, I thought some of the fresh air and sunlight I had allowed into the room might do him good, so I picked him up to put him back onto the bed and into the sunlight that shone on the bed there. He was lighter than I thought he would be, but even so his weight was a burden and I struggled to lift him up to the bed, managing to only lift his torso off the ground. I grunted and swore softly as I tried to drag him up and I started to entreat him to help me, although I knew it would do no good. His limp form offered no resistance and no help as I struggled with it. I heaved with all my might and finally cleared his torso from the ground and guided him back up towards the bed. His head cleared the edge of the bed as I lifted, and sun streamed onto it, and I dropped him in shock as he was wrenched violently from my hands. We fell back to the floor, and I tangled up with him; I flailed about in a panic. I scrambled free and then crawled back to him, desperate to ease his suffering as mewling sounds of pain escaped his throat, but as I got there, he was pulled backwards, backwards by something under the bed! The first pull dragged him halfway into the darkness beneath the wooden frame, and the second tore him from my grasp and he disappeared fully into the darkness there. I fled the room and the house in a panic and raced to the home of my neighbor, Mr. Sandu. I pounded on his door but there was no answer. I sat there in the relative safety of his doorstep, terrified and shaken, trying to make sense of it all. In the waning hours of the afternoon, I think I managed to convince myself of the truth: my dear Edmund had rejected me, had pulled himself violently away from me and was even now choosing to waste away rather than allow me to care for him. Well, I decided through the sobbing and the tears, I would not allow that to happen. I marched resolutely back to our home, and into the nursery I saw immediately that he had not moved from under the bed, though I fancied I could see two cold predatory eyes—not the eyes of my husband—staring at me from the darkness. I shuddered but decided that I would play whatever game my husband’s feverish mind was involving itself in, and so I closed the window and drew the coverings, again leaving the room in darkness save for the single flickering candle. When I turned around Edmund was back in bed, covered in shadows and sheets as if he’d never fallen out of it in the first place. This happened in mere seconds, and I never heard so much as a rustle of the sheets. I felt an overwhelming rush of terror at his sudden reappearance, and I must confess I—blinded by fear—left him there without so much as checking to see if he was alright. Afterwards I despaired. That all happened a few days ago. There has been no change since, I am still full of despair, and he is still a shadow of a person. He accepts what liquids I give him; he takes the medicines without complaint, he even eats the food I place in his mouth and—eventually—fills the bedpan, but he did not and does not do any of those things of his own volition, his body only going through these motions when I require it to; otherwise, Edmund lays there unspeaking and unmoving. The poultices are not working, and he is not getting any better. Every day he gets a little gaunter, a little thinner, the dry and broken skin spreads a little more, and his breath smells a little fouler and there is nothing I can do…I just want my husband back.
The Fourteenth of April, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
Vermin. As if my husband’s illness was not enough, I noticed the first rat a few days after the incident with the open window as it scampered across the kitchen floor. Where there is one, there will be more, is what my mother always said about rats, and I know now she was right. I am not sure why they have arrived now, just another test from God, I suppose. I am starting to sympathize with Job’s plight more and more each day, though I recognize that my suffering is not nearly as great as Job’s and even less so than what my husband is going through. I will use some of the Paris green that Edmund purchased the last time we had an infestation, and my rat problem will go away, just like that. In recognizing such a simple solution as that, I can see how overdramatic I am being. I think I am just overwhelmed and looking for any reason to not write what I really need to talk about, what I really need to share here: what happened with Edmund not even a few hours ago. I am still shaking…
It started with a cracking sound, a brittle sound that made me think of dry twigs snapping in winter, that roused me from a fitful nap. I have not been sleeping well and when I do sleep my dreams are feverish and fretful—my mind always on the verge of waking. When I woke, I found myself at the kitchen table unable to fully recall what I was doing before I fell asleep or why I was awake. The night arrived while I was sleeping and filled the room with its obscuring presence and so I lit the lamps in the room, searching for what half-remembered sound woke me. As light filled the room, the snapping sound came again and this time it was accompanied by mewling, pain-filled whimpers; the same sound a newborn kitten might make if stepped on. At first the sound was everywhere, the cracking surrounding me and the mewling filling my ears but as my ears adjusted to being awake again, I realized that the sound came from the nursery, from my Edmund, and I rushed to the door. I reached out timidly; I know that I should have thrown it open and raced to his side, but fear stayed my hand. I paused, my hand hovered just over the doorknob as if there were flames on the other side heating the metal handle; I took a deep and steadying breath, and then I froze as I heard a voice from the other side of the thick wooden slab that separated my husband and I.
“Pllllleeeeaaassseeee,” a voice filled with fear and agony whined weakly. What followed was another sharp snap and a screech, and that is when I did find my fortitude and threw open the door. The light from the lamps spilled into the room from behind me, my shadow stretching before me, and illuminated Edmund, kneeling with one arm extended towards heaven with an open hand and the other trying to pull his arm down. The light from the doorway mixed with that from the single candle that I now kept permanently lit in the room. It flickered and flared in the sudden rush of air and the shadowed corners of the room swelled and shrank as if the lungs of a giant creature were inhaling and exhaling. My husband whimpered again, a pleading and awful sound that contained no words I could understand. I looked again at his strange stance and his wide eyes staring away from the doorway, gazing up as if he were being held aloft and that was when I noticed the figure standing there in the breathing shade—in the dancing darkness—holding Edmund aloft by one arm, and I raised my hand to my mouth to stifle a gasp as I took the scene in.
My mind reeled as it tried to process the moment—even now it is a fragmented phantasmagoria—but what I saw was a figure, as much made of darkness as cloaked in it, holding Edmund with one hand in an iron grip. No matter how much Edmund struggled he could not get free, even though it looked as if the stranger were just casually holding his hand. The figure gently reached down and caressed Edmund’s head with its other hand, its overly long fingers casually twining themselves through some of the last strands on his almost bald scalp. As it did so, my husband’s expression turned from one of fear to one of ecstasy wrought at the hand of a lover. Then suddenly it ripped the tuft of hair from his scalp. Edmund screamed and I did too, and the figure glanced up at me.
Edmund’s free hand went to his scalp as his shadowed tormentor waved at me and pointed down to Edmund’s other hand. It reached down and closed its hand languidly around Edmund’s little finger and with a vicious wrenching motion, violently pulled it up, causing it to make the same brittle snapping sound that had roused me. Edmund and I both screamed again, Edmund in anguish and I in rage. Incensed, I raced into the room, and snatching the candle off the bedside table, I rushed the bed and shoved the tiny flame in the face of my husband’s torturer.
The figure reacted to my assault by releasing my husband and diving to the floor before I could get a good look at it, though now that I was close enough to make out some detail, I saw that my husband’s assailant was tall and thin, though hunched a bit in his shoulders (I am assuming gender here, but the presence in the room felt malignantly masculine). His head appeared to be somewhat malformed, though, again, I only had the briefest of glimpses before he dropped into the space between the wall and the bed. I did not hesitate, I placed the candle, its flame quivering wildly, back on the table that I had snatched it from and grabbed Edmund—whose fluttering, racing heartbeat, whose lightness as if full of hollow bones and whose fragility made me think of a wounded bird—and dragged him from the bed. His limp body was slick and damp with sweat, but I was able to keep him propped up as I pulled him towards the beacon of light that was the doorway. I looked down at him as we entered the rectangle of light pouring in from the kitchen and I was horrified by what I saw: his skin was gray and pallid and coated with an oily, glistening sheen and his countenance was a ruin. That very morning when I had gone in to see him, he had half of his hair remaining; it had been falling out steadily since he’d arrived, but I’d been warned that one of the side effects of his powders would be hair loss and I had not been alarmed. Now, though, his pate shone bare in the light and covered in angry red sores where the hair had been ripped free from the scalp, and I pictured that foul intruder covering my weak husband’s mouth with one hand to stifle his screams while the other wrapped those spidery fingers lovingly over each lock before yanking it free. The vision broke a sob loose from somewhere deep inside me, but almost immediately that sob turned into an anguished scream as darkness snaked out from under the bed and wrapped itself around my Edmund’s ankles. I frantically dragged Edmund toward the doorway, but to no avail: no matter how hard I pulled, Edmund was held in place by a terrible strength. A moment passed this way and then with a monumental pull, and, yes, this time I KNOW it was a pull and not him pulling away from me, he was torn from my arms and dragged under the bed. I dove to the floor and scrambled after him. Reaching under the bed with both hands, I grabbed hold of one thin wrist, and I pulled him toward me as hard as I could. Almost instantly, I felt what must have been a horde of hairy bodies writhing against my arms, like thousands of flies or spiders traversing my flesh. My skin crawled in revulsion, but I did my best to hang on to my husband’s wrist. Once, when I was a child, I fell into a bramble, and my arms and legs became covered with dozens of prickles, which were agony to remove. What was happening to my hands in the darkness under the bed was a similar sensation but magnified tremendously. I tried to use the floor and the bottom of the bed to scrape off whatever it was that was assaulting me, but to no avail. Whatever was attacking me simply flowed away to another part of my flesh, and continued to inflict me with what seemed an endless barrage of stings. Inevitably, I found the growing agony unendurable, and I had no choice but to momentarily loosen my grasp. This was all the opening my opponent, whatever it was, needed, and my husband’s wrist was torn from my grasp. I caught his fingers for a second, as they slipped through mine, but it was only for a second. I pushed further in to try and recover the grasp I had lost, but instead of my husband’s hand my fingers brushed up against something large, with coarse fur that stabbed into my fingertips. My hands recoiled from under the bed, and I stared at them in horror, for they were now covered in tiny, bite-like wounds, many of which oozed blood. I scrambled back away from the bed and to the doorway and then into the hall as the light reflected back from dozens of tiny eyes. I crawled forward as quickly as I could and pulled the door shut and struggled to find my footing. I sat at the table for the rest of the night, an array of weaponry—kitchen knives, a hatchet, a mallet, and a fire poker—in easy reach of my seat should that monstrous intruder make another appearance. I know you, if you were real, would ask me why I did not run to the authorities with this incident and I would tell you, “Because I do not believe it myself.” If I cannot believe what I just recounted as fact, then how would anyone? I would most certainly be confined to Bedlam within minutes of concluding my story. As for Edmund…well, I am not sure, but I feel like whatever is happening to him is absolutely a fate worse than death. Speaking of, I checked on Edmund not long before I started this passage and from my vantage point in the doorway I could see that he was resting comfortably again. I could also see a tall, dark shape holding very still in the corner, the still area in the room noticeable because it did not dance in time to the candlelight’s rhythm as the rest of the shadows did. I did not react, simply told Edmund that I would be in shortly to give him his medications soon and to feed him some broth, the only thing he’s been able to keep down the past week or so. (As an aside, the doctor who visited after Edmund first stopped eating said that he was not exhibiting any real signs of starvation despite his constant vomiting of normal food, oatmeal and the like, that I could spoon into his mouth.) I stepped back and closed the door and started this passage a few minutes later. I had to write it all down before I convinced myself it was a dream or a hallucination or that I have contracted whatever brain-fever ails Edmund. No, what I saw was a demon. An incubus or a succubus perhaps, I have heard that these beings haunt good men until they drive them to ruin and eventually death. I’ll need help to deal with this.
The Sixteenth of April, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
He arrived at the table as dark fell last night. I was not expecting him but there he was, cloaked in shadow and changed so much that I barely recognized the scarred, bald and malformed beast that sat there before me as my husband. You, my faithful friend, are wanting to hear that I met him with a doctor in tow, or the police, or a priest perhaps, that we were able to capture his shadowy tormentor and bring him back to health, but that would not be the truth and I promised you that—if only here—I would not lie. So, the truth: I fell into a fugue and sat despondent after the events of the last entry, for a day and a night, at the kitchen table. From time to time, I heard the scurry of rats in the walls around me, and more strange noises and whimpers of pain from the nursery, but I was not paying them too much mind; I was fixated on what I had seen in that room. What had the strange “person” in my Edmund’s room been doing?
That question was on my mind as Edmund announced himself with a spidery flicker of fingers dancing lightly on the back of my hand, and I gasped and jumped with fright. I had not heard his approach or when he seated himself at the table across from me, in his usual spot. I pulled my hand away instinctively and he left his hand on the table as I turned to regard him. He was cloaked in shadow—and I mean this quite literally, a cloak of darkness deeper than the gloom of the room hung upon him—his eyes were hidden completely in deep pits of darkness and his skin had become like gauze or paper over his cheek bones. His head seemed misshapen as well, though I imagine that was his newly bald pate throwing me off. I looked at his hands and saw his fingers were all longer, the skin pale and bruised at the knuckles and joints. He lifted one hand languidly, and it seemed to me in that deep gloom as if the shadows covering him moved first and his fingers danced like a marionette in reaction instead of their own volition.
“Please listen to me very carefully, my dear,” said Edmund, his voice a raspy whisper. “I am still somewhat in control, at least my mind is my own for now, even if my body is not. My darling, do not touch me for it will kill you if you do. I am in control now, but only barely, and this…disease…I think it did not realize I could still control myself; I allowed it to be overconfident and now I can finally tell you what happened…and what needs to happen.”
I reached for him, heedless of his warning, and the shadow around his lips pulled back as I leaned in and peeled open his mouth in a parody of a comforting and kind smile, full of feral-looking, jagged and broken teeth. Without thought, my body recoiled from the sight, and I pulled my hand back as Edmund resumed speaking, his voice low and hurried.
“In Wisborg, I was attacked. I…went to a house there in the city in search of the last people known to have succumbed to the terrible wasting disease, that plague. The house was largely undisturbed when I arrived, the bodies had been removed but the house was largely the same as the day the bodies were discovered. I tried to learn more about what happened, but the locals and the authorities were not forthcoming, other than to tell me the couple was beloved in the community and that the husband traveled often for work. I was excited to learn about this man, this Hutter, and I hoped that he would be the source of the plague, or at the very least that he could provide the vital clue we were missing. That perhaps something he brought back in his travels…” He trailed off for a moment. “In the house, in the bedroom there, something happened, and it took hold of me. It’s not a person. I know you must think it is. But it’s not. It’s the plague, it’s a malady of corruption: of the soul, of the body, and of the mind, and I am terrified of what happens if I do not cure myself. There is only one way that I can think of to do this, so I need you to…” He grunted as he lifted his hand and I saw a piece of paper below his palm. “Take this note to Sardu…”
“Sandu, dear.” I corrected him automatically; he was always calling Mr. Sandu by the wrong name and so my reminders of the correct pronunciation were just as constant and, for a moment, the air grew thick with a bittersweet nostalgia as I was reminded of the well-oiled routine and banter we’d once shared. I reached for the note, hesitating as I did so. The hand stayed where it was, hovering just above my hand, but the shadow that clung to him reached for me frantically as I snatched the note from under his hand. “When did you write this?” As soon as my hand moved back to my lap, from darkness back into the dying light cast into the room from the window, his hand relaxed—as did the writhing, shadowy parasite that I knew was killing him. I am not so much a woman of reason that I will discount the supernatural as some of my husband’s peers and co-workers do, men of Reason who decry the existence of the Supernatural while trying to tell me that God (a supernatural being if ever there was such a thing, I would think) would not allow such claptrap to exist. I think they just say that so they can be justified in believing that there might be bogeymen in the world, creatures outside their limited capacity to understand and in doing so they cling to the idea of all-consuming light that defeats the darkness but—in my limited experience—it’s what exists in the absence of light that can do the most damage, a way of thinking that has allowed me to approach this situation with the outwardly calm demeanor I try to present each day to Edmund as he lies there being tortured.
“It is weak during the day, but so am I. I am unable to move much when the sun is up, my body… It feels incredibly heavy and I find it hard to will myself—or want to will myself—to move but, more importantly, it sleeps then as well. The daylight creates an adverse reaction, you see, and I was content to rest when the torment paused for those few hours at a time. But today the whispers changed, and so I felt I had to move…had to do anything. Its hunger is growing, you see, and now it is whispering that it—no, we—need more sustenance. It cries to me even now that the rats will not do any longer, for there are no more rats, are there? Not under the bed, at least, and the rats were fine but now they are gone, and it wanted you, and that is why…I had to move.” Edmund trailed off as something scurried along the right side of the room. I could see that it was a rat, a large rat, and it was running along the wall toward a hole near to the nursery door. Edmund never looked at it, but I know that he saw it nonetheless; for even as he looked at me, the shadowy presence lunged predatorily at the rat and fell atop it in a blur of darkness. Edmund sat there for a second as the darkness stretched away from him, frantically trying to tear the rat to pieces, and said, “Help me.” In the moment before he followed the darkness— before he bolted from the table then in a herky-jerky motion, a marionette of flesh being pulled viciously at the behest of his shadowy puppeteer—and fell onto the terrified rodent with a savage glee, I saw him clearly and I saw a ruin of a man, filled with pain and wanting his suffering to end and then he was gone. He moved so quickly that I barely registered it, one moment he was in the chair imploring me and the next he’d scurried across the floor and was hunched over the rat, having scooped it up off the floor where the darkness had accosted it seconds before. I thought that he was going to tear it to pieces, or perhaps bite into it, but instead he seized it and stood up—he was taller now—and raised the rat with two hands above his head, holding it firmly upside down with its head just even with his mouth. For a moment I expected him to bite down on the rodent’s head, when instead he twisted and squeezed with a violent wrenching motion, opening his mouth as he did so. The rodent’s frenzied and frantic squeaks and squeals were cut off abruptly as the contents of its body poured from its mouth and eyes and into my husband’s mouth. He brought the rat’s head down to his mouth, wrapped his lips around it and sucked hard as if drinking from a bottle. His mouth made thick, syrupy slurping sounds as the rat’s body deflated under Edmund’s ministrations, euphoria radiating from him as he ate. Unheeding of the danger, I turned away and rushed from my seat to the window, where I vomited up the meager meal of broth and bread I’d eaten today. When I straightened up and fearfully cast a glance to where they’d been moments before, I found that Edmund and the shadowy presence had vanished and that the door to the nursery was once again closed.
The Seventeenth of April, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
I delivered the note to Mr. Sandu last night after Edmund left, making my panicked way there just as the sun vanished and the darkness of the kitchen filled me with fear. After Edmund disappeared, I hurriedly packed a bag with some clothes and you, dear diary, took the note Edmund had given me, and then I fled across the street as the sun set and darkness unfurled into the street. After I knocked, I handed him the note and he looked at it and then, with a sharp look full of barely concealed fear, looked me over, scrutinizing me in a way that I was unaccustomed to and then—saying nothing—closed the door. Despairing, I turned away and started heading back to my home, and I am ashamed to write that I wondered if Edmund was going to kill me when I returned. The thought made my feet move a little slower and my head hung a little lower.
“Veere urrr uuu goen?” The jumble of words caused me to turn around and find Mr. Sandu standing there. His wispy gray hair flew about in the night breeze and the eyes in his heavily wrinkled countenance looked at me with sympathy and sorrow and understanding. Nail heads protruded from between pursed lips, which accounted for the jumbled speech, and as I glanced down, I saw that he held a sheaf of papers in one hand and a hammer in the other. He strode past me and down the lane towards my house.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, but he did not offer a response. He simply walked to the house and began methodically nailing pieces of paper to the front door in a maneuver I felt he must have borrowed from Martin Luther, though I do not know how the 99 Theses (or were there only 94 or 95? I can never remember) could help in this particular circumstance. He hammered the last nail into the door and then hung a cross on the door that he produced from one of his pockets. He went around to the windows next, closing the shutters that were open and hanging crosses and nailing pages to them as well, and he worked on Edmund’s room last. A few minutes later he stood back and nodded.
“That should hold for a while at least,” he said. “Come with me now, back to the house. We have not a minute to spare. There is only one way to solve this, I am afraid, and you will not like it. But Edmund knows what needs doing, that is why he sent you to me. We spoke of this very topic once and I will tell you now what I told him then. This disease is fatal, for the victim, certainly, but also for everyone around the victim though the victim will be responsible for those deaths. I can see you understand what I mean.”
I nodded, frantically, eager to share my experience, “Edmund is different now, I thought…just now, in the kitchen…he wanted to…his face…the rat.” I tried to articulate what had transpired but the words refused to come. Horror overwhelmed me and the world swam with too-bright light and too-dark shadows, all warring for my attention. Hands, firm and steady, caught me, and then strong arms were holding me up as the world shut down to a narrow tunnel which steadily closed until darkness overcame me. When I woke it was morning, or rather it is morning as I write this. I found myself in Mr. Sandu’s spare room, a spartan affair if ever there was one, on a too hard mattress, and here I remain as I write down the events of yesterday. I cannot believe that so much has transpired in such a short time. Everything is wrong and it may never be right again but…I must confess that I feel much better now that I am getting the proper assistance. Edmund always spoke highly of Mr. Sandu, whom he referred to as a scholar and a theologian and a priest and a doctor. An enigma, he once confided in me, that he could not get a full accounting of Mr. Sandu (to which I gently reminded him it was Sandu…) and that made the man a total mystery. Edmund was never satisfied with a mystery, and I imagine he took the time to try to get to know our neighbor, for they seemed to get along well enough to share the occasional meal. I will write more later after I speak to Mr. Sandu.
The Eighteenth of April, Eighteen
Hundred and Thirty-Nine
There is blood on my hands. It is dried under my fingernails, it has stained the lines of my knuckles and palms, and left freckles where there were none previously. There is blood on my face. I can feel the spattered drops drying there even now, even though I have long since washed my face, and I am not entirely sure that I can convince myself that I will ever be clean again. Not that it matters. Edmund is dead. Nothing matters anymore.
After I finished the last entry, I left the room and found Mr. Sandu sitting at the kitchen table. Two plates of food waited there as well as a valise case, much like the doctor’s case that Edmund took from place to place each day when he was working. Mr. Sandu said nothing as I walked up to the table and sat down, he simply picked up his fork and started eating and I did the same. The food was delicious, and I felt terrible and guilty for enjoying it, but the eggs were seasoned in a way I was not used to, as were the potatoes he’d cut into wedges and fried with the fat from the bacon he’d cooked. Richer still was the thick dark drink which I do not know the name of as I never did ask him, but I assume that it came with him here from lands much farther away than our small English hamlet. As soon as I finished eating, he picked up our plates, put them in the sink, and then he walked purposefully back to the table and looked down at me.
“There is only one thing to be done. There is only one cure for what ails him,” he said as he laid down the note that Edmund gave to me to deliver. It read: NOSFERATU. RELEASE ME. PLEASE. I know I gasped at this; even though I did not recognize the first word, deep down I had already come to the same conclusion. Mr. Sandu did not speak again; eyes brimming with loss and sorrow, he picked up the bag and left. I followed him, though I knew he was giving me a choice. In the end, I knew there was no choice at all.
We crossed the lane and went to my home; the sun was out, and it was a beautiful day. The papers nailed to the threshold fluttered in a light breeze and made the house look condemned and dangerous. I opened the door and Mr. Sandu pushed past me and I found myself wondering how he planned to do it exactly, how was he going to release my Edmund. I assumed that Edmund was asking for death, and that he and Mr. Sandu had discussed something along these lines in the past, but I did not know how to ask. It never occurred to me that I might need a friend one day to perform as great a service as Mr. Sandu was about to grant Edmund, and I found myself profoundly glad that he was here. I was not equipped to do any of what might be necessary to defeat whatever fell spirit had a hold of my husband, and I knew I definitely could not have done what Edmund had asked of Mr. Sandu. I could not kill Edmund; I could not release him as he asked. I would only have been able to guide him along as he wasted away, unable to hasten the process to conclude before its time. But with Mr. Sandu, I saw a way to end Edmund’s suffering in the here and now.
“Wait, what must I do?” I asked as I gripped Mr. Sandu’s arm to give him pause as he stood in the hall. He turned back to me and snapped open the case.
“We will find him and then we will provide him the only cure for this that I know, this…” He trailed off as he pulled an elaborately carved spike from the bag. It was tipped and capped in silver, and the shaft of the spike was stained a deep crimson, almost black, carved with shimmering letters that danced in the light. I didn’t need to ask what it was for; it was evident that it would be the instrument of Edmund’s release. I nodded, fighting back tears as I came to terms with what was about to happen, and opened the door for him. He strode through the dark house and set the spike and his bag down on the table and, in the meager light trickling in from behind the shutters and the doorway, I watched as he reached into the bag and withdrew a large hammer, a lamp, a candle match, a nail and a cross. While he did that, I crossed the kitchen to open the window there, but he stopped me with a raised hand. “We do not want any attention to come to what we are about to do,” he said, and lit the lamp with the match.
Warm light filled the room and Mr. Sandu walked to the door of the sickroom, carrying the nail and the hammer. He gently tapped the nail into the door and then picked up the cross and hung it from the nail. He nodded at his handy work and then returned to the table once more to pick up the spike. At his indication, I picked up the lamp and followed him to the door of the sickroom, where he paused.
“Why are you stopping?” I whispered.
“To give you one last moment to reconsider. He will not survive this and there is no time to say goodbye,” he replied.
“You said it was the only way, and his note…it begged you for…well—” I couldn’t finish the thought. I could hardly think straight.
Mr. Sandu did not ask again. He opened the door and strode into the darkness, leaving me to follow with the light. I hesitated, a pause that saved me as Mr. Sandu vanished into darkness. He became a shadow among shadows, a cruel puppet about to end an awful play as he raised the hammer above his head and positioned the spike above Edmund’s heart. I heard the sound before Mr. Sandu, I think, that dry rubbing and rattling of fur and bone mingled with the clicking of hundreds of nails, and by the time he did hear the sound he was hearing it from the bottom of a horde of tearing, clawing, biting bodies that rushed from under the bed. He dropped the hammer and the spike on Edmund’s chest as he fell back into a surge of tiny, furred things and they covered him completely as I rushed forward to aid him, thrusting the lantern before me. The light from the lantern revealed a writhing pile of creatures that appeared only barely rat-like—horrible, shriveled creatures that seemed to be bags of loose flesh covered with fur, with bones piercing the skin and dripping with darkness. I caught a glimpse of one that had a long tear in its side, and I could see that it was empty inside but for the skeleton, the undead thing twitched horribly as it joined the horde and scurried away from the light and back towards the safety the underside of the bed provided. As the horde retreated somewhat in the face of the light, I was able to see the ruin that once was Mr. Sandu. In the seconds that he’d been submerged, the rodents had chewed apart his face, leaving the flesh torn and ruined and streaming with blood. One eye was missing and the other had no eyelid over it and was wildly and spastically glancing about while seeing nothing. His nose was gone, and his mouth was stretched open, with the rotten, desiccated body of one of the creatures struggling to crawl down his mouth, and I thought to reach for its tail and pull it out when I looked further down and saw that Mr. Sandu’s throat was distended and multiple tiny heads were protruding from his neck as the beasts sought egress from the confines of Mr. Sandu’s body.
In the moments following the revelation of utter carnage I panicked and—with a scream that I did not recognize—leapt onto the bed to avoid the rats, even as the throng streamed back under the bed and away from the light. My swinging lantern revealed a nightmarish version of Edmund; his skull was completely bald and scabrous, and his jawline was more pronounced, as were his cheek bones. Sharp and jagged teeth rested atop his bottom lip, and I felt a moment of terror as I considered that he had wanted to use these horrible and jagged things to do to me what he’d done to that rat in the kitchen—what he’d done to the rats that I had just seen decimate Mr. Sandu. That fear turned to rage as I met Edmund’s gaze. His eyes were still wells of darkness, but floating there in the middle of each pool was a cold and merciless iris that made me think of the pitiless stars on the coldest winter nights, and they were the eyes of a stranger. That was where my rage stemmed from, that this curse could take my husband away before I could tell him goodbye, and it was this rage that helped me to act. Without thought, I set down the lantern and snatched up the hammer and spike.
Of its own volition, the hammer seemed to raise itself and a ringing sounded out as it came down on the silver-encased end of the spike. Then a second ringing sounded out, then a third, a fourth, and then merciful silence as the hammer finally ceased its work. The rustling of the rats stopped as well. I reached out and caressed Edmund’s broken and twisted face. I tried to wipe away all the blood that spewed forth from his mouth as the hammer fell but I only succeeded in spreading it around and staining my hands. Then I sobbed, with sorrow and with relief, as I saw that those two hateful orbs were no longer floating where my husband’s kind eyes should have been. There was only darkness. I climbed off the bed, and I had to push aside the semi-decayed furry bodies that covered the floor. I shudder now as I think on it —those rats must have been puppets like my husband, vicious little marionettes tasked with protecting Edmund and whatever dark forces that possessed him. I looked again at Mr. Sandu as I stumbled from the room and saw that the rats that had been working so hard to escape the confines of his throat had mostly failed, with many of them still halfway out as their animating force left them.
And now—with the blood of my husband covering me—I am finally confident enough to write that I have taken care of almost everything else, all that’s left is to throw you out the window before I close it again for good. Not to worry though, I will wrap you in the weather-proof satchel that Edmund used to travel with. I will wait here with Edmund and Mr. Sandu as the flames from the fire I started in the root cellar eat the house away. The floor is already getting hot, so I must hurry here. I coated all three of us in lamp oil, just in case. And—again, just in case—I mixed a generous amount of the Paris green with several glasses of the good brandy that Edmund kept for visitors and special occasions, and drank them down, one after another, until I felt a bit numb. I think our deaths would qualify as a special occasion. The Paris green is working, as it is getting increasingly hard to focus and my stomach is starting to ache fiercely. So, this is goodbye, thank you for being my confessor and my confidant. I hope that this account is found, and that it answers any lingering questions anyone might have about what happened here.
My God preserve and save our souls,
Mary Stuard